When do people usually play?

For the first time ever in my GW1 career, I logged into GW and found that no one was playing in any of the heavily populated cities. Maybe everyone was in an instance? When does everyone play now? This was very freaky and forced me to post a topic about it.

I have noticed that the weekends are the most populated times.
The american servers are the only ones with a big population and times when people here in the usa are not working/going to school are when you will find more people online.
So I would say besides weekends, after 3pm est daily until midnight-ish pst.

That being said, unless there is a zaishen quest, most outposts will be pretty barren of people due to folks playing with heroes mostly. You will find people hanging out in kamadan mostly spamming wtb/wts stuff (and afk---). LA has a population at times, I rarely see people in Kaineng for very long. Other place folks can be found is the great temple of balthazar (during the peak hours listed above).

Same here, I logged back in the other day and I found hardly anyone around. I went to LA and just hung out there for a little and found a nice, small and friendly guild. They are helping me to beat the NF campaign. No one really plays during the week so I would suggest try joining the guild, most of the people in that guild will help you if you get stuck on missions or anything.

There are people playing 24/7.
They're just hard to find.
Kamadan always has people there but usually the troll level is high.
As stated before, finding a guild/ally with people active in your time zone is the best bet to keep enjoying gw.

By far the most important thing you can do is to ensure you're in the American districts. You can switch with the menu in the upper left hand corner when in a town/outpost. It's still certainly not loaded with people, but it's unusual to see empty outposts (albeit, only due to a couple of other players), at least at peak times.

+1 recommendation for joining a guild.